The Times and The Sunday Times and carefully selected third parties use cookies on this site to improve performance, for analytics and for advertising. By browsing this site you are agreeing to this. For more information see our Privacy and Cookie policy.

Flawed windfarm subsidies will add £1.5bn to bills

The majority of the extra costs are understood to relate to the Triton Knoll project off LincolnshireAlamy

Consumers will pay about £1.5 billion too much for electricity from new offshore wind turbines because ministers awarded unnecessarily generous subsidies, the public spending watchdog has found.

The government awarded contracts last year committing households and business to paying up to £176 million a year on their energy bills for 15 years to subsidise three large offshore wind farms and a clutch of small biomass and energy-from-waste projects.

Yet more than half of this sum — or about £100 million a year — is likely to be the unnecessary result of a flawed tender process that gave some developers higher subsidies than they asked for, a National Audit Office (NAO) report published today shows.